


Resurrection Z Redux

by DesertScribe



Category: Z Nation (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Fix-It, Zombie Apocalypse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-21
Updated: 2020-11-21
Packaged: 2021-03-08 21:33:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27203218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DesertScribe/pseuds/DesertScribe
Summary: The fight against the suiciding cult members gets started earlier than in the original version of Resurrection Z.
Relationships: Addison Carver/Mack Thompson, Charles Garnett/Roberta Warren
Comments: 4
Kudos: 7
Collections: Fic In A Box





	Resurrection Z Redux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [StopTalkingAtMe](https://archiveofourown.org/users/StopTalkingAtMe/gifts).



**Somewhere less than 87 miles from Kansas City, Missouri:**

"Just a little bit farther now," Charlie said as they exited off the already narrow state route highway they had been traveling on and continues along an even smaller side road. "In a little less than a mile, there'll be a left turn which feeds directly into the main entrance. It should be hard to miss."

Roberta could hear the crinkle of paper as he traced their route with his finger, but she didn't take her eyes off the road to look at where he was pointing on the map. She trusted his navigational skills enough to not need to double check them. Also, even seemingly out in the middle of nowhere, you never knew when a zombie might wander out into the middle of the road without warning. Running over zombies on purpose could be fun. Running them over by accident without having seen them coming? Not so much, especially not when they only had the one vehicle and were trying to make it last as long as possible.

If there really was an occupied settlement of any notable size nearby, then finding a replacement vehicle would become more difficult, what with the locals having already spent the past three and a half years scavenging through the available selection. You were a lot more likely to find a working vehicle in a ghost town where everyone had been wiped out hard and fast back during Black Summer, and you were a lot less likely to get shot at in the process, too.

However, Roberta thought, aside from matter of finding and claiming abandoned vehicles as expediently as possible, the idea of real civilization beat out abandoned ghost towns in all other categories, hands down. None of the places they'd passed through since leaving behind the remains of Camp Blue Sky had qualified as a genuinely functional community, but Province Town promised to be different. At least that was what Hammond's old map suggested.

If left to her own devices, Roberta's pragmatic side was more inclined to side with Murphy and expect the place to be yet another empty ruin when they arrived. She wasn't left to her own devices, though, not when Charlie still had enough hope for all of them, both in terms of believing that Province might still be going strong months after Citizen had relayed that information to Hammond and in terms of believing this crazy trek to California could possibly succeed and save what was left of humanity. It shouldn't be enough to go on, but backing Charlie had gotten Roberta through three years of apocalypse, which was no small feat given how many other people in the world hadn't made it that far. Even Roberta's pragmatic side had to appreciate that achievement. Roberta's softer side appreciated it even more while also appreciating things like his easy smile and the even easier way that he moved in a fight. Therefore, she was all in with Charlie for as far as his hope could carry them.

And what would happen if the great Sgt. Charles Garnett's hope ever ran out? Maybe then it would be Roberta's turn to have enough pragmatism for all of them and keep the mission going a little while longer. She hoped it wouldn't come to that. Yes, she _hoped_ , and damn the irony of it all.

Meanwhile, her pragmatic side was whispering that god helps those who help themselves, so she reached up and banged the heel of her hand against the ceiling while calling, "Heads up, people! We're about to reenter civilization, so let's try to remember how to look friendly and make a good impression!"

Roberta hadn't really expected anyone to give much of a reaction to that, and for the most part she was right. Mack, however, had apparently fallen asleep at some point since their last pit stop (though Roberta couldn't even begin to imagine how he had managed to do that in the open bed of a moving pickup truck, unless it was more akin to a fainting spell brought on by a combination of hunger and too much time out in the sun), and at the sound of her banging he awoke with a yelp, flailing around and almost hitting Addy in the process. Judging by the heavy thump she heard from back there, he might have missed Addy but he definitely didn't miss punching the side of the truck. Roberta could only wince in sympathy, knowing the boy's knuckles were sure to smart for a good long while after doing something like that.

"You okay back there?" Charlie called, twisting around in his seat to look through the open rear window.

"Yeah," Mack said, though the word came out more like a question than a statement. "Yeah," he repeated, still not sounding very sure of himself. In the rear view mirror, Roberta could see him looking around, seeming a little confused. "Sorry, bad dream. Uh, where are we?"

"About fifteen miles west of where you reached through the window and smacked me in the back of the head for asking, 'Are we there yet?'" Murphy grumbled, not even bothering to look over his shoulder at the person he was talking to.

"Well, go ahead and ask it again, just this once, Murphy, and we can give you a better answer," Roberta said before any arguments could start brewing. "We're here." She slowed the truck as the final turn-off for their destination for the day came into view. Charlie was right; it was hard to miss. And judging by the armed guards standing out front, the place was also still inhabited.

The guards, the closed gates, and the long expanses of intact looking chain link fence topped with barbed wire all promised security. The sign declaring that visitors must surrender all weapons was a lot less reassuring given what kind of apocalypse they'd been living in for the past three and a half years. Judging by the various reactions Roberta heard from the rest of the group as she brought the truck to a stop a little ways back from the gate and its guard station, she wasn't alone in her assessment.

Doc and Cassandra gave grumbles of displeasure that were too indistinct for Roberta to quite make out the exact words of thanks to Mack's much louder exclamation of "What the hell?" overlapping with 10K's equally disbelieving, "Surrender all weapons? Are they serious?" Murphy refrained from commenting, but that was not as much of a surprise as it ordinarily would have been since he never bothered carrying any weapons anyway.

"What do you want to do?" Roberta asked, because Doc, Cassandra, Addy, Mack, and 10K were nice to have as backup in a fight, but Charlie was the one calling the shots on this mission.

"Their town, their rules," Charlie said calmly, but Roberta could tell that he was running threat assessment on the guards in front of them and all the visible defenses surrounding the cluster of low buildings that made up Province Town.

At that sight, the gnawing hunger which had been clenching in Roberta's gut for the past two days was briefly replaced by something warmer and a lot more pleasant, because while she loved that Charlie was a 'glass is half full' kind of guy, she also loved that he still thought tactically enough to continue making contingency plans for dealing with the other half of the glass.

"Looks like we don't have much of a choice," Charlie continued.

Roberta didn't have any counterarguments to that, so she just answered him with a shrug and then eased the truck the rest of the way up to the gate before putting it back into park again.

The four guards didn't like this latest development and made their displeasure known by moving into formation and raising their weapons. Roberta could only watch as Charlie slid out of the passenger seat to approach the guards on foot and try to talk them down. She knew that he expected her to leave him behind in favor of driving Murphy and the rest of Operation Bite Mark out of the line of fire if shooting started, but she wasn't sure if she would be able to go through with that unspoken plan. Fortunately, the way that Charlie managed to convince one of the guards to go get her boss made it look like the situation wasn't going to come to shooting, at least not immediately.

"Easy, everyone. Charlie's got it under control," Roberta said, as much to herself as the rest of the group.

She didn't even realize her slip until she heard Murphy sneering reply of, "So, you're calling him Charlie now," as it was some kind of shameful admission of weakness.

"Yeah, and I'm gonna start calling you my bitch if you don't shut up," she sneered right back at him in reply, because fuck that noise. There was nothing shameful about what she and Charlie had going between them. Maybe she had never called him Charlie when talking to the group before, but she had been calling him that in her head for years now. She resolved to start calling him Charlie more often, because she liked how his face had lit up that little bit extra the few times that she had done it in private. Murphy, and everyone else for that matter, could learn to deal with it or face the consequences, assuming they all lived long enough for any of that to matter.

A lean white guy emerged from the small building serving as a guard shack, though Roberta couldn't tell if he had been in there the whole time or if he had just come through it as a way of bypassing the main gate. The conversation that Charlie had with him was quieter and therefore harder to follow from a distance, but he must have been the same Joe Williams that Charlie hoped he'd be, because in short order the tense standoff eased enough for the guards to lower their guns, and then they were officially granted permission to enter Province Town.

Roberta still wasn't particularly keen on giving up their weapons, but the wind chose that moment to shift. The scent of frying onions and bell peppers drifted over them from somewhere inside the compound, causing Roberta's stomach to wake with a vengeance and demand veto power over her head and heart's questions of safety. A chorus of growling stomachs around her indicated that she was not the only one in the truck having such an experience, and soon they were all trooping over to go through the security checkpoint, not exactly eager to divest themselves of their assorted firearms, blades, and blunt instruments, but a lot less reluctant than they had been a minute ago.

Just as the last of Operation Bite Mark stepped into the weapons-free interior of Province Town, another group showed up also seeking entry. The fact that this other group was trying to be allowed back in after getting kicked out sounded like potential trouble, but Major Williams seemed willing to give them the benefit of the doubt, and Roberts couldn't think of a good way to question that without also bringing into question whether her own group deserved the benefit of the doubt.

Also, Roberta didn't like how Mack seemed to waver on his feet when he turned to look at the other group still outside the fence. Maybe he was just feeling the effects of low blood sugar levels like the rest of them were. Maybe he had managed to brain himself on the dirt bike or any of the other equipment that shifted around loose in the bed of the pickup truck while he slept back there. Either way, the sooner they could get that boy sat down somewhere and fed, the better. Hell, the sooner they could get all of them sat down somewhere and fed, the better. All other less immediate problems could wait until after this most pressing concern had been taken care of.

Williams explained the basic reasoning behind the 'no weapons' policy as they walked. Roberta didn't exactly like how Williams was confident enough in his security measures to immediately brush off Murphy's point about the possibility of someone going Z inside the perimeter from natural causes, but she chose to let it slide for the moment. If they decided to stay in Province Town to rest and recuperate for any significant amount of time, then she would discuss the matter with Charlie and they could bring it up again with Williams in private so it wouldn't look like they were trying to needlessly bust his balls about it in front of an audience. If they decided to load up on supplies and be on their way again in less than twenty four hours, then it wasn't any of their concern whether or not any of the locals were secretly at severe risk of dropping dead from a massive stroke or any of the other ways that a supposedly healthy human body could suddenly go fatally wrong without giving any noticeable warning signs beforehand.

What Roberta did like about the tour was how it ended in the cafeteria. Williams talked about composting and electricity and filled in a few of the blanks regarding the other group at the gate, since those three had also gravitated to the cafeteria, and then it was finally time to eat. There was not much in the way of protein options available that she could see, but the fruit looked amazing enough to be worth the stop all by itself. Seriously, Roberta hadn't seen such good looking cherries since pre-Z, and even those hadn't been locally grown in Missouri. If everything else about the quality of life in Province Town matched the quality of the produce, then maybe the place really was as perfect as Williams was selling it. It probably wasn't, Roberta knew, but she could pretend it was for the duration of the meal before she and Charlie got down to brass tacks and planned their next move.

Everyone loaded up their plates. Then, while Addy and Mack lingered at the buffet tables, whispering and feeding each other cherries (apparently Roberta hadn't been the only one impressed with the quality of the fruit), the rest of Operation Bite Mark sought out places to sit. It was an easy feat to accomplish since the cafeteria was only about a quarter full. Roberta and Charlie sat down at a table with Williams to begin the process of negotiating for supplies. Cassandra, Doc, 10K, and Murphy claimed seats at the next table over, possibly out of reluctance to let the group be split apart while surrounded by so many strangers, possibly out of a desire to eavesdrop. If it was the latter reason, Roberta couldn't entirely blame them, not when there was no telling what kind of hints about their shared past either Charlie or Williams might let slip over the course of the conversation. Roberta herself hoped to get at least a few good stories about Charlie out of Williams before they left, but business before pleasure.

Well, business before the pleasure of gossip. Other small pleasures could be enjoyed while conducting business, such as the particular variety of casual contact that Roberta had tried to avoid back when she thought there might be a chance Antoine was still alive and waiting for her to find her way back to Castle Point. Maybe she and Charlie didn't really need to sit so close together that their arms and thighs brushed against each other, not with the whole rest of the table free of occupants, but it sure felt good. The smile that Charlie flashed her direction as she scooted her chair right up against his told her that he felt the exact same way. Roberta caught sight of Williams's eyebrows climbing a little higher toward the brim of his cap as he watched the pair of them, but it looked like it was just surprise, not displeasure, and he kept his mouth shut on the subject, which Roberta appreciated.

"We're headed to a CDC lab in California," Charlie said, getting straight to the point, despite having a plate of food in front of him for the first time in days.

Williams's response was immediate. "You're never gonna make it to California." It came out so fast that Roberta had to hold back a laugh at how little thought he could have possibly given the possibility of their mission's success while being so ridiculously optimistic about his own.

Charlie also seemed to be more amused than offended, offering a wry smile as he said, "Yeah, that's what I've been told." It was hard to be offended by being told in no uncertain terms that they were going to fail after having similar discussions with Murphy on a daily basis.

"No, seriously. The Zs are swarming out west. Millions of them," Williams said. He leaned in closer, glancing back and forth between Charlie and Roberta, as if any of this was somehow new information that they hadn't already heard repeated a dozen times over from various sources during their travels. "Been hearing about it second and third hand. Nothing left to eat in the city, so they're pouring into open country, forming mega herds. Rumor has it the whole west coast is a no-go zone."

"Well, we still got to try," Charlie said patiently. "The guy's a pain in the ass, but he's our only chance for a cure."

"Getting yourself killed won't cure anything," Williams insisted. "I could use you here. I need--" Whatever it was that Williams wanted to say he needed got drowned out by the sudden loud clatter of falling cups and plates accompanied by shouts of, "Whoa, sorry, man!" and "Hey, get off of me!" coming from somewhere behind them.

Being seated at the end of the table, it was easier for Roberta to spring from her chair and get herself turned around than it was for Charlie, who had to contend with the table in front of him and the chairs that had suddenly been thrust back against his own as 10K, Murphy, and Doc also jumped to their feet (along with everyone else in the cafeteria) to try to see the source of the commotion. Even so, Roberta felt like she must have missed something important as she spotted Addy standing on the far side of the room, still holding her tray of peanut butter sandwiches and fruit as she stared down in surprised confusion at the two still-seated members of the recently returned ex-cultists and a flailing tangle of arms and legs, which logic suggested was probably Mack and the third ex-cultist struggling against each other on the floor, but that was only Roberta's best guess, because the main action was barely visible aside from a split-second glimpse of moving bodies mostly hidden by the table and other onlookers.

Roberta had just enough time to take two steps toward the action while thinking about how you didn't really need an official weapon to kill someone, just a well-placed high speed impact between the person's head and the edge of a table or the floor or a fist, all of which were readily available, and how she really needed to break up this fight before Operation Bite Mark got kicked out without supplies for ruining Province Town's yearlong safety record. She doubted it would matter to the locals whether Mack had been the one to start the fight or the other guy. Then, before she had a chance to take a breath and make use of her best "Do what I say or face an ass-kicking you'll remember for the rest of your short life" military voice to tell both men to knock it the hell off and behave like civilized people, Mack disengaged from his opponent without being told, staggering to his feet and backing toward Addy.

For a moment, it looked like the fight would be over as quickly as it began. The trouble might be just beginning, but the physical danger looked like it should be over. However Roberta's gut told her something still wasn't right, so she kept herself moving closer. Charlie must have felt the same way, because she could hear him mutter, "What the hell is he doing?" as he followed her just a step behind. She couldn't tell whether Major Williams was also following or not and didn't want to look away from whatever was happening in front of her long enough to find out. It was a good thing she didn't, because it kept her from missing any of what came next.

"Dude," Mack said in the kind of overly loud voice which suggested that either he was half shouting to hearing himself above the kind of internal ringing you got from a hard punch to the ear or he was deliberately playing to the audience of people who still hadn't done much of anything about the situation beyond mutter a few tentative protests at having their quiet meal disrupted, "where did you get _this_?!?"

Mack held the object in question up above his head for everyone to see, dancing out of the way as the other guy (and, yep, that was Mr. Big White Boy Ex-Cultist #3, though maybe not so Ex-, judging by Mack's little trophy) lunged at him, shouting, "Give that back!" The object was a strange looking knife with an oddly blocky hilt and tiny little blade no more than three inches long and less than half an inch wide, and sight of it triggered what the previous fight hadn't: all hell broke loose.

Shouts of "Weapon!" and "Oh my god, he's got a knife" echoed through the cafeteria as some of the locals rushed for the exits while others finally tried to step in and intervene in the situation, and everyone got in each other's way in the process. Meanwhile, Cultist #3 and some of the onlookers might not have realized yet what exactly he had just admitted to with his little outburst, but Cultist #1 and Cultist #2 seemed to figure it out pretty quick and clamored up onto their table while pulling out matching knives of their own, shouting something about the glory of the Resurrected and then stabbing themselves first in the guts and then in their necks.

By the time Roberta and Charlie pushed through the churning mess of people, it was too late to save either of the suiciding cultists. Cultist #3 probably would have abandoned trying to get his knife away from Mack in favor of grabbing one of the other two knives from out of the now slackening fingers of his fellow cultists, but Roberta and Charlie got to them first. Cultist #3 also found himself dealing Addy, who entered the fray by swinging her tray into his face with all her strength. The lightweight rectangle of plastic was no deadly Z-Whacker, but she had it turned sideways to hit her target edge on, delivering the maximum possible amount of force along the minimum amount of surface area. Even over the noise of everyone shouting, Roberta could hear the crunch of breaking bone, and Cultist #3 crumpled to the ground with a howl as he clutched at his bleeding nose.

This left Roberta and Charlie free to deal with the two dying cultists who were already on their way to going zombie. Without proper weapons, that was easier said than done. The very thin blades of the cultists' knives were sturdy enough to cause fatal wounds to a human's soft tissue, but they were too weak to penetrate through a zombie's skull to kill its brain. They were probably that way by design, so that the people of Province Town would still be functionally weaponless instead of being able to use the suicide implements to mercy the newly turned Zs. If that much forethought had really gone into this attack, Roberta thought, then this Resurrection Church was even more diabolical than they had already seemed.

Roberta's earlier thought about not needing weapons when you could deliver blunt force trauma still applied, but it was a lot more dangerous to try to put that theory into practice against a Z than against a human. It was especially dangerous against freshly turned zombies, who fought like maniacs both in terms of their frenzied attacks and in terms of being freakishly strong thanks to no longer operating under of the influenced of the small but important part of the brain that usually persuaded people to hold themselves back to some degree out of self-preservation. So, yes, Roberta could try to grab one of the zombies by the collar and try to hoist it up and either slam its head back onto the floor or slam it into the edge of the table all before it managed to take a chunk out of her exposed flesh, but she didn't really want to do that if a better option was available.

"Everybody, hold them down until someone can go and get a pike," Williams shouted. Luckily, everyone who hadn't already run off chose to hang back and hold off on following that order until it was absolutely necessary. Addy and Mack might have listened to Williams under other circumstances, but they were already busy pinning down the only cultist who wasn't dead yet. 

"Hell no," Roberta shouted back, because _that_ plan sure wasn't the better option that she had been hoping for. "That's just asking for a whole bunch of people to get bit!" So much for trying to avoid busting his balls about his leadership choices in public, but Roberta was not going to worry about the possible fallout from that outburst until she was sure they were going to live long enough for it to be a problem.

"It's the only thing we can do," Williams insisted. "We're out of time here." He was right about that part. The cultists, who were definitely ex-cultists now if only in the same sense that the dead parrot in that Monty Python sketch was an ex-parrot, were already transitioning out of the all too brief stillness of death as the HZN1 zombie virus inside of them completed the inevitable process of turning human corpses into human shaped monsters.

Charlie stepped in between Roberta and Williams, either to break up their arguing or to put one more obstacle between Roberta and the awakening Zs, but Roberta didn't have time to figure out which, because at that same moment her eyes landed on the row of extra chairs (sturdy metal chairs designed to withstand years of constant use and abuse) lined up neatly against the nearby wall, and she instantly knew with such certainty how they could kill the zombies that she wanted to kick herself for not thinking of it sooner.

"Remember Blue Ball, Pennsylvania?" she said, grabbing Charlie and pulling him toward the line of chairs.

"Vividly," Charlie said, immediately catching to Roberta's line of thought.

"The smorgasbord or its creepy huge underground gift shop?" Cassandra asked, appearing at Roberta's side with 10K close behind her. Roberta could only hope that Doc was still keeping an eye on Murphy wherever he was. The last thing any of them needed was for their mission to do another runner when everyone was already on alert for a zombie outbreak and get his head smashed in with something heavy as a reward for his cowardly efforts. And speaking of smashing in heads with something heavy….

"The smorgasbord," Roberta said, grabbing a chair, passing it to Charlie, who accepted it with a knowing nod. As Roberta grabbed another chair for herself, she said, "You and 10K take the girl. Charlie and I'll take the guy."

"Got it," Cassandra and 10K agreed in unison, and each of them picked up a chair.

"You're in the splash zone, people," Roberta bellowed to the onlookers as Charlie tightened his grip on one of the metal cafeteria chair's rear legs, swung the chair up over his head, and brought the top corner of its backrest down onto the head of the zombie who used to be the good looking but misguided Asian boy. It was the same basic well-practiced motion he used for splitting firewood and for driving stakes into the ground with a long handled sledgehammer. Roberta knew this from a long and detailed study of the matter which she had conducted over their years together at Camp Blue Sky.

The zombie, who had just sat bolt upright and was halfway into lurching to its feet so it could throw itself at any available convenient source of fresh brains, never saw what hit it. Charlie's blow knocked the zombie right back to the floor again. Then, just as quickly as he had struck, Charlie got out of the way and let Roberta take her turn.

She was not quite as well-practiced in the art of the two handed overhead skull smash as Charlie was, but she managed it well enough to keep the zombie down and even leave a matching dent just a little to the left of the one Charlie had given it. Then it was time for Roberta to get out of the way and admire Charlie's form again as he took his next turn at hitting the zombie.

A little to one side, Cassandra and 10K performed a similar choreography of destruction against the zombie who used to be the pretty white girl cultist. The only difference was that the younger pair chose to hold their chairs by the loops built into the tops of the backrests and stab downward with the legs of the chair. That method didn't allow for as much brute force, and you had to be more careful about aim or you'd miss the zombie's head entirely, but it had the benefit of needing less room to swing so that both attackers could stay in place and pin down one of the zombie's arms with a foot while they worked instead of each needing to get out of the way while the other took their turn. Roberta might have gone for that option if she and Charlie hadn't had such a bone deep knowledge of how they moved together in a fight and what kind of rhythms they could expect from each other given a particular type of weapon.

Both methods were effective. In less than a minute, both zombies had been thoroughly mercied with only minor damage to the cafeteria's flooring. However, the cafeteria's previous state of cleanliness did not survive. The place was going to need a whole hell of a lot of scrubbing before it could be considered clean again, though; Roberta's pronouncement about the area being a splash zone had been accurate. Good thing that surprise health inspections of food service facilities disappeared along with most of everything else during the apocalypse or else the Province Town Dining Hall would have been in danger of getting a failing grade right now thanks to Operation Bite Mark.

Charlie was breathing heavily from the exertion and covered miscellaneous bits of zombie splatter, but he was grinning with the satisfaction of a job well done when he finally let the chair fall from his hands, its purpose having been served.

Roberta grinned right back at him. If not for the risk of tasting the zombie fragments that were on both their lips, she would have happily kissed him right there on the spot without a single care for who saw it.

Williams did not appear to share their post battle elation, but there was a definite look of relief on his face. He also looked like stress was giving him a little bit of a facial tic. Or maybe he was just trying to hold back a smile of his own.

"I can see why you picked her as your second in command, Garnett," he said.

"We kind of picked each other," Charlie replied, straightening up out of his loose limbed battle ready stance and back into a more rigid military posture.

Williams nodded. "Yeah, I can see that. Looks like you two might just--"

For the second time in as many minutes, whatever he was planning to say to them got cut off mid-sentence as a new commotion interrupted him. Fortunately, the interruption this time came from the arrival of reinforcements instead of more danger.

"Where's the zombie outbreak?" the first of the guards asked as she burst through the door only to be brought up short by a surprising lack of running, screaming, or other chaos. The two other guards who piled in behind her looked equally surprised by finding only aftermath instead of an active situation.

Instead of answering immediately, Williams turned and did a rapid scan of each member of Operation Bite Mark and everyone still in the cafeteria, asking, "Any of you lot bit?" Roberta could respect his reluctance to declare the situation to be completely handled until he had made sure for himself. She was doing a similar check, and it looked like Charlie was too.

"I'm good," Roberta said.

"Me too," Charlie said.

"No bites here," Cassandra said.

"Five thousand one hundred and fifty six," 10K said as he set down his chair. He had delivered the final brain-destroying blow to their zombie, so he could claim the kill.

Williams frowned. "That's not an answer that means anything to me, kid."

"No bites," 10K replied, echoing Cassandra.

"How about you two?" Charlie called to Addy and Mack, who were still pinning down Cultist #3 by way of kneeling both their body weights on top of him, Addy low on his legs to keep him from kicking while Mack straddled the small of his back and held one of the guy's arms twisted behind his back and tried to keep his other arm pinned to the floor. It was an awkward arrangement, but preferable to taking more drastic measures on him only for it to accidentally result in a third Z for them to deal with.

"We're both good," Addy said.

"Technically this guy is too," Mack added, somewhat unnecessarily given how he had to shout to make himself heard over Cultist #3's unending litany about the glories of the Resurrected, which through the fight had only been interrupted by brief pauses to draw more breath before continuing.

"At least in the sense of not about to go Z any time soon," Addy said. "His nose is probably never going to be quite the same. And, he's definitely no good in the sense that he wanted to kill himself and everyone else here. And," she added, "even as a human he's a biter."

"Yeah," Mack said, now addressing the man on the floor, "seriously, dude, not cool. Who do you think you are, Mike Tyson?"

"How 'bout the rest of you?" Williams asked the onlookers.

There was chorus of affirmations of wellness which more or less matched those that had been given by the members of Operation Bite Mark.

One disheveled older man awkwardly shuffled forward with one hand raised and said, "I'm not bit, but in all the excitement I accidentally sat on a fork."

"Then that is a matter for you to take up with the medic, Walt, and not a threat which the community defense force needs to deal with," Williams said with a weary sigh, and Roberta suspected that the man must be seriously reevaluating the locals' disaster preparedness based on their performance (and lack thereof) here today. He gave everyone another once-over, possibly as an excuse to wait for anyone to show signs of having lied about being free of zombie bites. Then he finally turned to the waiting guards and said, "I think we can declared the zombie outbreak to be contained. We still need to deal with this traitor in our midst, though. You three get him secured and then contact the people marked on the roster as cleanup detail and auxiliary cleanup detail so we can get this place fit for serving food again before dinnertime."

The guards gave simultaneous, "yes, sir"s and crisp salutes, and then they went and relieved Addy and Mack of their prisoner, one guard collecting the knives while the other two secured Cultist #3's hands behind his back with handcuffs. Then the guard with the knives left out of one exit, presumably to take the contraband weapons out to the checkpoint at the gate or some other designated secure location, and the other two guards marched their still-bleeding prisoner out through a different exit. Roberta wondered if they were going to throw him in the zombie cage or if Province Town had a separate lockup somewhere for live prisoners.

"I want statements from everyone here for the incident report by the end of the day," Williams told everyone, and that did a better job of breaking up the remaining group of lingering onlookers and sending them about their business than the suicide attack by the cult members had. Even in the apocalypse some people just couldn't resist putting themselves in danger just to be able to say, "I was there," later but would scatter as soon as anyone asked them to fill out official paperwork describing what they had witnessed, because that felt more like homework than bragging rights.

Williams looked around at the mess surrounding them with a pinched look of displeasure on his face. "I'm going to check on the other main places people tend to congregate in the compound, to make sure the people running scared from here didn't trigger any trouble anywhere else. You lot, stay here and listen for the 'All Clear' announcement over the PA system. I'll be back a few minutes after that to show you the more mundane amenities we have to offer." With those parting words, he stalked off through the same door the guards had escorted Cultist #3 out of.

"And just like that, we're practically alone again," Addy laughed as she and Mack wandered over to join Cassandra and 10K.

"It's about damn time," Cassandra muttered as she set down her own chair, which up until that point she had still been holding clutched in her hands. She almost sat down in it, thought better of that idea before it was too late, and instead sat down in an entirely different one which was further away from the site of the recent mercy-ing and therefore free from pieces of zombie detritus. "I don't think I've been around that many live people at once since Black Summer. And you don't need to tell me I have teeth in my hair," she added with a sigh. "I already know."

10K stared at her for a moment with his head tilted to one side, then said, "They too big to be from our Z. Must have come from theirs." He pointed in Roberta and Charlie's direction but then immediately lowered his finger when he noticed that Roberta was looking at him with one eyebrow raised in silent question.

"Let me get those for you," Mack offered to Cassandra, and after she gave a shrug of assent he reached over and picked the offending zombie teeth out of her hair.

Roberta watched all this happen without commenting on any of it. The people who lived here might have had their faith in their safety shaken today, but for Operation Bite Mark it was just another day in the apocalypse. A few weeks from now, this would barely be worth remembering. Although, come to think of it, there was one thing that she really needed to comment on.

"Did anyone see which way Murphy went?" Charlie asked, beating Roberta to the punch by half a second in terms of timing and by a mile in terms of picking a much more important question than the one she had been about to bring up. Her own question of why Mack had put those zombie teeth in his pocket after taking them out of Cassandra's hair would have to wait until after they had dealt with tracking down their missing future savior of humanity.

"No, I didn't, damn it," Roberta said.

Everyone else chimed in with a chorus of regretful negatives.

"I'm guessing Doc did," Roberta added, "but since he's not here either, that doesn't help us much."

"Yeah, that's what I figured," Charlie sighed. There were always plenty of reasons to sigh in the apocalypse, but everyone seemed to be doing it a lot more since meeting Murphy. "That leaves us with a few options here. Option one: we can wait until Joe comes back and ask him to bring in extra people to help with the search, but that blows our chance of keeping a low profile while we're here."

"Ha," Addy blurted out. "That ship has sailed, with two zombie heads smashed against the hull to christen the voyage!" She gestured to the bloody evidence which was all around and all over them.

"It blows our chance of keeping Murphy on a low profile," Charlie clarified.

"As far as anyone here knows right now," Roberta said, picking up the explanation where Charlie left off, "Murphy is just some rando we brought with us. If we start making a fuss that it's urgent we find him as soon as possible because he's super special, then people are going to want to know why he's special."

"Yeah," Mack said, making a disgusted face, "this place already has a cult of zombie-worshiping assholes stirring shit up. Imagine if those guys caught word we're hauling around a guy who looks like he's turning half-Z and doesn't have to worry about their bites."

"They'd watch him run away screaming from the first Z they showed him and decide he's useless, just like we did," Addy said.

"It would be better if they never knew about him at all," Charlie said.

"And you should never trust a cult to take the non-crazy option," Cassandra pointed out.

"Yeah," Addy reluctantly agreed, "I guess cults don't become cults by passing up chances to raise the ambient level of batshit insanity."

"Words to live by, sister," Roberta agreed.

"Which brings us to option two," Charlie said. "We can split up before Joe gets back, each of us going in a different direction and hope one of us is lucky enough to find Murphy without any of us causing fresh trouble by being outsiders wandering through a compound already on high alert from an attack." He glanced around to see if anyone was going to try to interrupt him this time, but no one did, so he continued. "Option three is we try to think like Murphy and try to find him by a more deductive search. Option four," Charlie said, leading the rest of them back toward their abandoned plates, which fortunately were far enough away from the fight to have remained untouched by both fleeing people and projectile zombie pieces, "is we all stay here, finish our food. The danger's been neutralized, and Murphy will probably wander back here when he gets hungry." 

"Can we really trust Murphy to have as much sense as a runaway house cat?" Addy asked. "I mean, it would be nice and all that, but it doesn't seem like enough of a sure thing to pin the future of humanity on it." Her words would have carried more weight if she had not been wiping the blood off her hands with a napkin and stealing food off other people's plates as she said it.

"Doc should, even if Murphy doesn't. In the meantime, they aren't here to defend their food, so you and Mack can raid theirs," Charlie said, pulling his own plate safely out of Addy's reach.

It wasn't as if Doc and Murphy would have any real reason to complain about the theft, Roberta thought, since they would be able to refill their plates again from the currently unattended buffet right next to their tables. She glanced over at the buffet to make sure that its bounty had not been contaminated or otherwise ruined, just to be sure. Roberta was not sure if she would want to trust the fruit at the end which had been closest to the fight without washing it first. Those sneeze guards hadn't done nearly enough to protect the food as their designers liked to pretend the would. This end of it looked fine, though. There was more than enough untouched food to limit the inevitable complaining to minimal levels. Or maybe the complaining was not as inevitable as it should have been, because while looking at the buffet, Roberta caught sight of something which gave her pause.

"You mentioned thinking like Murphy," Roberta said, tapping Charlie on the arm and then pointing to what was almost certainly the route Murphy would have taken while fleeing the cafeteria. It was the door closest to where they were sitting, an unobtrusive sliding slab of metal to which someone had taped a small handwritten sign saying, 'Kitchen.' With their current location as a starting point, Murphy wouldn't have needed to head towards the zombie threat to get there, and that door looked like it was less likely to be blocked by other fleeing people who had mostly headed for what looked like the main exits. "Mr. Kitty isn't going to get hungry enough to wander back any time soon if he went somewhere with its own stash of snacks."

"We should have time for a quick check before Joe gets back," Charlie said. He shoved the rest of his peanut butter sandwich into his mouth, washed it down with a swig of water, and then pushed himself away from the table and headed for the kitchen door.

Roberta followed Charlie, and they both grabbed empty trays off of the buffet as they passed it, just in case they needed to follow Addy's earlier example. It wouldn't be as effective against a Z as against a human adversary, but it would be better than the cafeteria's selection of flatware, which consisted of soup spoons, short-tined forks, and table knives which looked like they had been intentionally modified to make them even more dull than the usual institutional standard offered in an elementary school. Hell, even the spoon handles looked sharper than the knife blades. On second thought, she grabbed a couple of the spoons and slipped them into her back pocket. As a matter of last resort, she could probably use the bowl of the spoon as a handle while shoving the handle up a zombie's nose and into its brain.

Addy, Mack, Cassandra, and 10K followed behind Roberta, and the jangling sound of metal against metal told her that she was not the only one stocking up on substandard stabbing implements.

When they got to the door, Charlie and Roberta had a quick and silent conversation conducted with only looks and gestures. A few more gestures told Addy and Mack what Charlie wanted them to do. Roberta thought Cassandra and 10K probably understood enough of their signing by now to follow the basic gist, but they hadn't been with the group long enough yet for her to be certain. Then Charlie gave a countdown with his fingers. At his signal, Roberta heaved open the kitchen door, and Charlie took point, stepping through quickly but cautiously. Roberta followed, with Addy and Mack right behind her and Cassandra and 10K bringing up the rear.

It was lucky that Charlie went in with his tray held up and poised to swing if necessary, because it saved his life. Past the door, there was a stretch of narrow hallway before reaching the actual kitchen, and as soon as Charlie reached the point where the space opened up, something swung in hard and fast from around the corner, right at head level. Charlie barely deflected the blow with his tray and wouldn't have been able to do even that much if he hadn't been at the ready.

The impact shattered the tray. Charlie let go of the pieces as he dropped low and rolled forward to get himself away from the choke point and out into the open kitchen where he would have more room to maneuver in the coming fight.

Roberta rushed forward to help him, but the coming fight didn't actually come, though, because Charlie came up out of his roll and spun around to face his assailant but froze while pulling back to throw a punch with a cry of, "Doc?"

And sure enough, there was good old Steven Beck, standing there with the mother of all meat tenderizing mallets clutched in his hands and sputtering, "What the hell, chief, haven't you ever heard of knocking instead of sneaking in like you're creepy cultists planning to murder a guy?"

"The cultists' first step was to turn themselves into zombies," Charlie said straightening out of his fighting stance. "Zombies don't sneak. Also, _ow_!" he added, shaking out his hands, which no doubt had taken a fair bit of punishment from holding that tray while Doc smashed it.

"Zombies sneak around plenty," Murphy piped up in a slightly muffled voice coming from somewhere unseen at the far end of the kitchen.

"The man has a point," Doc said with a shrug. "I've seen plenty of Zs that don't even bother to snarl until they're already trying to go all cannibalistic bad touch on you." A thoughtful look passed across his face, and he continued, "That's assuming, of course, that you're going with the idea that zombies are still human enough that their eating people counts as cannibalism. If not, then it's not cannibalism but still definitely a bad touch."

"That's not what people usually mean when they talk about getting bad touched," Addy said, stepping into the kitchen. She scanned the place for weapons, looked disappointed by what she saw (and Roberta didn't blame her for that, because she was disappointed by that too; who ever heard of a kitchen without functional knives? Even the vegetable peeler left lying on the counter was the kind with its blade mounted perpendicular to its handle, making it more like an oversized Lady Bic than a potential stabbing implement.), and settled for picking up one of the pointier fragments of Charlie's shattered plastic tray.

"It's a bad enough touch," Doc said.

"Can we focus here?" Charlie asked, looking around with a frown. "We neutralized the threat in the cafeteria before it could spread. Where's Murphy?"

"You can come out now, Murphy!" Doc called out to the general room.

"No! You swore you'd pike me yourself if I came out before you gave the official 'all clear' signal, so I'm not getting out until you give the official 'all clear' signal," Murphy called back, making it easy for the group to home in on his location by sound as they moved deeper into the kitchen. "If you want to make stupid rules and insist I live by them, then you have to live by them too!"

When they reached the source of his voice, Roberta was a little surprised by Murphy's choice of hiding place, given his previous panic attack in the elevator back in DC, but she figured the man couldn't be in any real distress at the moment if he was managing to sound so thoroughly sulky instead of afraid.

Doc, meanwhile, just rolled his eyes. "Fine," he said out loud. Then, after silently mouthing, "You see what I have to put up with here?" to the group, Doc picked his way through the assorted lightweight pots, pans, and such which were scattered all over the floor at that end of the room. When he reached the second cabinet from the right, he knocked out 'shave and a haircut, two bits' on its door.

Murphy immediately kicked the cabinet door open from the inside and half climbed, half fell out.

"I thought you didn't like small spaces," Charlie said, eyeing Murphy suspiciously. Roberta was sure that everyone else had been wondering the same thing.

"I hate being stuck in small spaces full of people," Murphy said defensively. "It's manageable if I'm all by myself and I can get out whenever I want." He made a show of brushing the dust off of his knees and twitching his shirt cuffs back into place. "Anyway, what did I miss?"

"Just the usual," Abby said casually. She tried to flex the piece of broken tray in her hands to test it for hidden cracks that might cause it break into smaller shards in the middle of a fight.

"Nice shiv. Wrap something around the wide end, and you won't slice up your own hand when you stab someone with it," Murphy said, earning himself even more side-eyes than the group had already been giving him. "What, some stuff you just pick up by osmosis while in prison, whether you want to or not."

"You want it?" Addy said, holding out the piece of tray to him.

Murphy snorted disdainfully. "Not my style," he said.

"Of course is isn't," Addy said. "Putting any effort into saving your own ass other than running away is never your style."

"The most sensible first step to save my own ass would be to get myself as far away from you lot as possible," Murphy sneered, "so maybe you shouldn't encourage me."

"Anyway, chief," Doc interjected in an overly cheery manner before the argument could get any worse, "what's our next move? Stay here for a few days? Grab what we can and head for the hills before anyone tries to blame us for arriving on their doorstep at the same time as misfortune did? Something else in the vast gray area between options A and B?"

Before Charlie could answer, there was a rapid and irregular series of gunshots from somewhere not _super_ nearby but still a whole lot closer than there should have been when nobody in this place was supposed to be carrying guns unless they were outside the fence.

Charlie's expression immediately hardened. "Our first step is to confirm who's shooting and why. C'mon, everybody." He grabbed Murphy by the arm and started pulling him back out of the kitchen by the same route they had all come in.

"Or I could just stay here, you know, out of the line of fire," Murphy said, reaching up to try to dislodge the grip on his wrist.

Roberta smacked his hand away before he could start clawing at Charlie's fingers. Then she got behind Murphy and started pushing so that even if he did manage to pull free of Charlie he still wouldn't have a clear path to bolt in the opposite direction.

"If things go bad, we might not be able to fight our way back here," Charlie said. "We'll be able to hightail it out of here faster and easier if you're already with us."

"You think it's that Jacob and more of his flock of zombie-worshiping crazies?" Roberta asked more to help drive the point home for Murphy than because she had any doubt of the answer herself.

"Seems like the most logical answer," Charlie said as he pulled Murphy past the sliding door and back into the cafeteria. "I mean, what's more likely, two attacks happening so close together but coming from two entirely different sources or Jacob's followers going kamikaze in here being the opening volley meant to soften us up for a larger attack?"

"I think you mean 'kami _zombie_ ,'" Doc said, "but, yeah, the latter."

Murphy's grumbled agreement was begrudging at best, but at least he cut back on how much he fought them, making his resistance more of a token than a real struggle.

"Where are we even going?" Cassandra asked as the group exited the cafeteria by its main door, filing out into the hallway.

"The shots sounded like they were coming from the front gate," Roberta said.

"Yeah," Charlie said, "but if Jacob and his followers have gotten inside, then they could be on their way anywhere now, so everyone be on the lookout for shooters or anything we can use against shooters." Charlie paused, looked around, then led them down an unfamiliar stretch of hallway.

"Hey, uh, didn't we come in back that way?" Doc said, pointing over his shoulder with his meat tenderizer mallet. The cooks of Province Town would probably want it back if they all lived through this, but Roberta wasn't about to raise any complaints about borrowing it for their own purposes right now.

"Yeah, but you have to remember he took us on the roundabout tour. This way," Charlie said, pointing ahead of them with his free hand, "should be the shortest route to the front gate."

The sound of more gunshots echoed from ahead of them, proving his point as they exited the building.

"And you're absolutely sure that's where you think we should be going?" Murphy pleaded. "Because it sounds to me like we could be walking into a firing squad. At any moment we could turn a corner and _blam_ , goodbye good humanity's only chance at an anti-zombie vaccine."

"Could go by roof," 10K said. He pointed to the building closest to the one they had just come out of. Like most of the buildings in the compound it was only a single story tall and had low hanging eves. The shorter members of the group would probably need help getting up there if there weren't any access ladders or convenient sturdy drainpipes to climb, but the taller members could probably just jump up, grab the edge, and, if they were any good at pull-ups, get on the roof that way.

"Good plan, kid" Charlie said. He gave 10K a clap on the back. He let them over to a corner of the other building where a vent pipe sticking up near the edge of the roof that looked like it should make a good handhold one a person got high enough to reach it. He laced his fingers together into a stirrup shape which he offered to Roberta. "With the buildings so close together, it'll be hard for anyone to get a shot at us as long as we don't get too close to the edges."

Roberta put one foot into his waiting hands, and then she pushed off of that as he heaved her upwards, being gentlemanly enough to not grunt in exertion in the process. Roberta caught the edge of the roof and pulled herself over the edge.

"Most people don't check the roof 'til they hear shots from up there," 10K said blandly as he helped boost Cassandra up the same way that Charlie had helped Roberta.

"Is that a piece of trivia you picked up post-Z," Murphy said, "or were you one of those creepy kids whose classmates were certain that someday you were going to bring a machine gun to school and murder them all?" He looked like he was contemplating taking the opportunity to make another run for it, while Charlie and 10K both helped Doc up, but Addy and Mack hemmed him in from behind, and another not-so-distant gunshot reemphasized why they were going up onto the roof.

10K seemed neither surprised nor offended by Murphy's accusation. "I was home schooled," he said without missing a beat.

"Of course you were," Murphy said, but he accepted 10K's silently offered hands to boost him up. Not that he should have needed the help, given his height. Then again, Roberta thought, remembering the scarred mess hidden under his shirt and his mention of the zombies pulling out two of his ribs, his core muscles probably weren't what they used to be, if he had ever been the type to do any pull-ups at all.

Roberta and Doc caught Murphy by the wrists and hauled him up to join them. Charlie and 10k boosted up Mack and Addy, respectively, and then got themselves up under their own power.

Once up on the relative safety of the roof, it was a mostly simple matter to get the rest of the way to their destination. There was one spot where there weren't any covered walkways connecting the buildings, so they had to take turns making flying leaps across an uncomfortably wide gap over an alley, but there was plenty of room to get a running start, and each of them had needed to make more desperate leaps at one previous point or another since the beginning of the apocalypse, so it was not as harrowing of an experience as it could have been.

As they neared the rooftop nearest the front gate, they crouched down and crawled the last part of the way so as to stay out of sight. From their vantage point looking down from the edge of the roof, they could see that the Province Town guards appeared to still be holding the gate. There were a few injuries on their side, but none bad enough to look like anyone was in immediate danger of going Z in the middle of the fight, unless there were heavier casualties who had been dragged out of sight somewhere. Williams and his guards were keeping a group of people outside the fence pinned down within the trees which stopped a few dozen yards from the edge of the driveway heading out to the road, but it was probably just a matter of time before someone on the other side realized they could sneak off through the trees, take the long way around the compound, and then snipe at the defenders from their other flank, if there wasn't already a group of them in the process of executing that very maneuver.

"Gee," Murphy groused under his breath, "watching all this from up here sure is useful. What do we do for an encore act, hold our fingers close to our eyes and pretend to crush their heads?"

"We figure out a way to turn the tide in favor of our friends," Charlie said quietly.

"How? By praying to Zombie Jesus to take our side instead of theirs? Because those weirdos have a head start on that, and if there's any such thing as non-zombie Jesus, I'm pretty sure he gave up on humanity a long damn time before the apocalypse started."

"We can't go down and get weapons form Joe and his people without putting ourselves into the line of fire," Charlie said, never taking his eyes off of the fight playing out below them. "Therefore, we help by staying up here and figuring out how to play David versus Goliath."

"I kind of get what you're saying," Mack said, "but if we're the ones with the height advantage, doesn't that make us Goliath?"

"No, because we're the ones who've got the kid who's good with a slingshot," Roberta said, grinning. An idea was beginning to take shape in her mind.

"Too bad he handed over his slingshot while unloading the rest of the arsenal he was hiding in his clothes," Murphy said. "Seriously, kid, how is it that you don't clank when you walk?"

"Practice."

"I'm pretty sure she didn't take all our rubber bands, which means that we can make our own slingshot," Charlie said, having immediately picked up on where Roberta was going with this. She didn't think he had guessed exactly how she planned to end it, though, and she couldn't wait to see the look on his face when he did.

Everyone searched through their pockets and, sure enough, produced a good selection of rubber bands in an assortment of sizes. 10K gave a nod of approval as he took the largest one and looped it around the thumb and index finger of his left hand.

"I hate to join the negativity parade," Doc said, "but despite my fondness for saying that 10K could kill a Z with a rubber band and a paperclip at fifty yards, I think Ms. TSA took all our paperclips back at the gate."

"There's gotta be some rocks around here," Cassandra said.

"On the roof? Murphy sounded intrigued despite himself.

"Yeah," Cassandra said with certainty, "there's gotta be at least one person living here who's gotten bored enough to throw rocks on a roof just for something to do."

Roberta could relate to that idea, remembering a few boys in her neighborhood who she had seen doing stuff like that. It seemed like the kind of activity that would be popular with at least a small subset of any population anywhere there was the combination of bored children, small rocks the right size for throwing, and high, hard to clean places to use as a target. A quick scan of the area proved fruitless. Maybe Major Williams ran such a tight ship that nobody was willing to risk getting caught doing anything like that. Maybe he was an attentive enough community to spot anyone who looked like they wanted to throw rocks on a roof and then redirect their energies into more useful directions. Maybe the hypothetical rock thrower had just picked a different roof to throw their rocks at. The building with the cafeteria in it was taller and therefore would have provided a more challenging target. However, it was not as unfortunate of a situation as it might have been, because Roberta knew they shouldn't need any rocks, not when she knew they had a secret ace in the hole which would make the perfect ammunition for their purposes, assuming of course that said metaphorical ace in the hole had not been put into a pocket with a literal hole in it.

"Mack's got zombie teeth in his pocket. Should be perfect ammo for a rubber band slingshot at this distance," Roberta said matter-of-factly.

There were simultaneous exclamations of "What?" which fortunately happened to coincide with another burst of gunfire down below from both sides, because several members of Operation Bite Mark had been shocked enough to forget that they needed to keep their voices down lest they give away their position.

"Uh, yeah," Mack said, carefully reaching into his pocket and then handing over the teeth to 10K. "It's an old habit from playing hockey: you find teeth, you pick them up and see if the rink's on call dentist can put them back in whoever they came out of. Then once I had them, I couldn't just throw them back on the floor again where some kid might find them. I was going to get rid of them once we were on the road."

"Trying to explain just makes it sound weirder," Cassandra said.

"What's really weird is why I got if the fight in the first place," Mack said. "I swear I've lived today before and the next six months too."

"If you're trying to distract us from your weird tooth collecting habit, it isn't working," Murphy said. "You're just multiplying the weirdness."

"We can deal with whatever this is later," Charlie said. "Let's stick to the immediate problem for now." He turned to Roberta and said, "You think if 10K shot a guy in the face with a dirty zombie tooth, it would just as good as a zombie bite." It wasn't a question. It also was a sign of just how messed up the world had become that he was able to say something like that while giving Roberta a smile of approval, but it made her heart do secret little back flips at the sight of it anyway.

Roberta gave him an answering grin. "That's exactly what I think," she said. "They want to worship zombies? Let's give them some sudden apotheosis and see how they like it."

"And Joe and his guards should be able to take care of the rest a lot easier after that," Charlie concluded. "I wouldn't want to do something like this to anyone else, but these folks have earned it. Think you can make the shot, kid?"

10K gave the rubber band around his fingers a few pulls to test its draw and then said, "Sure. Which three?"

"In a group where all but one person is in regular clothes, it's a safe bet that the guy wearing bright white robes and a self-satisfied smirk is their leader," Charlie said, pointing out the man who had to either be Jacob or, in the unlikely event that Jacob hadn't bothered to oversee this attack in person, a high-ranking follower who Jacob trusted enough to serve as his proxy. Either way, he was the person who the rest of the group would be taking orders from, and removing him would undoubtedly disrupt the others even if he was just a favored henchman instead of the head honcho. "Take him out first. After him, go for whichever ones look like they're the best shots."

10K let the first shot fly without any further prompting.

The tooth embedded itself in the exposed skin of Jacob's throat, right in the general area where Zs liked to take their first bite to incapacitate a victim before trying to chew through the skull to get to the brain. There was no sudden dramatic fountain of blood, but there didn't need to be. Instead, Jacob clapped a hand to his neck as if swatting at a stinging insect. The virus didn't have far to travel from "bite" to brain, and within seconds Jacob began swaying on his feet. A few seconds after that, all human awareness dropped from his expression, and he lunged at the follower closest to him.

10K made his next shots in quick succession, with similar results for both targets. Between the sudden zombies and Williams's forces, no one on Jacob's side lasted long after that. And that's how Operation Bite Mark saved Province Town and their biggest immediate concern became figuring out how to get everyone down off the roof without anyone breaking their neck or legs.

The whole incident was enough to make Charlie decide that they should take what supplies Williams could give them and move on as soon as possible before anything else could go wrong. However, even if they weren't spending the night in the compound, they could at least take advantage of the facility's hot showers before they left.

And as for what kind of celebratory activities Roberta and Charlie got up to together when it was just the two of them alone in that steamy shower room, well, that was nobody's business but their own. They were definitely going to have to find a way to thank Addy and Doc later for keeping everyone else out of there long enough for them to finish. It was entirely possible that it could be the last hot shower either of them got in their lives, but Roberta was going to make damn sure that it was only the first of many times that she and Charlie got to make use of all the tricks she had learned in Catholic school and all the ones she had picked up since then, too.

* * *

**A few hours later, back on the road and heading west:**

"So, Mack," Roberta said, breaking the long lull in the conversation which had descended upon the truck shortly after they left Province Town to finally address the metaphorical elephant in the room, "do you really expect us to believe that you're, what, some kind of time traveler?"

Mack, who along with Addy was taking his turn riding in the truck's cab while Cassandra and Doc rode in the pickup bed, shrugged. "It seemed real enough to me."

"Real enough to tell us what's coming up?" Charlie asked.

Mack shrugged again. "Addy and I spent a lot of time split off from the rest of you, but I can tell you that not far over the border into Kansas there's a town with a fifty pound bag of Gravy Train waiting for us and a silo full of fertilizer and zombies that'll make the biggest boom any of us have ever seen. Also, if we can just completely bypass all of Colorado and Wyoming, that would be _great_."

Roberta and Charlie exchanged a silent glance. They had both seen how Mack's eyes had cut over to Murphy for the briefest of moments while he said that last part. They would have to find a way to get him alone and ask him about it. Maybe it really was all just bullshit like Murphy said, but maybe it wasn't. Time travel wouldn't be all that much weirder than the zombie apocalypse which they were already living through.

Whatever it was, she and Charlie would deal with it together and their mission hadn't completely crashed and burned past the point of saving yet, and that was what really mattered. Roberta brought one hand up to kiss her fingertips and then and then reached down to stroke those same fingertips gently across Charlie's hand, which he was casually resting on her knee without a care for who saw it. Then she went back to keeping both hands on the steering wheel. As Roberta drove their little group toward the sunset and, ultimately, California and its waiting CDC lab, she felt a warmth which had very little to do with the late afternoon sunlight pouring in through the windshield and everything to do with a heart which was reluctantly filling with a little bit more hope every day thanks to the man sitting in the passenger seat next to her.

She was beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, they really would be able to handle whatever the apocalypse threw at them, even if it included weird shit like zombie messiahs and time traveling hockey players.

* * *

**Meanwhile, somewhere in Utah:**

Serena hitched up one of her backpack straps in an attempt to settle the load more evenly as she pivoted herself around to face each of the various roads, all of them seemingly equally desolate, stretching away in different directions from the intersection she had paused at. Helen had said that she was okay with Serena leaving, but Serena wanted to put as much distance as she could between herself and the compound as fast as she could, just in case Helen decided to change her mind. However, just getting _away_ was not the goal here. The really tricky part was figuring out where it was that she wanted to get _to_.

"Which way? Which way?" she muttered quietly, still pivoting around.

There was no answer aside from the faint whisper of the breeze blowing gently through the sagebrush and dry scrub grasses which made up the only other visible components of the local landscape aside from the thin strips of crumbling asphalt which she was trying to decide between.

"C'mon, Baba. I'm sure you must want to be born as much as I want you to be," Serena said, resting one hand low on her denim-clad belly. "But that's never gonna happen if we don't find your Daddy and get the process going." She repeated her pivoting motion, and this time she got a reaction. It wasn't a kick, because her whole problem was that she didn't have a baby in there yet to do any kicking, but she was certain that she felt a faint little ...something.

Serena repeated her pivoting motion yet again and got the same reaction when she was pointing in the same direction as the previous time. It was the tiniest of internal twinges, like the little false alarms she sometimes got right before she ovulated. With a smile, Serena slid the hand on her belly a little to one side.

"That's my good little girl," she cooed and then started walking in the direction the tiny twinge had indicated. "East it is, Baba," Serena said as she hitched up her backpack strap again. "It's all gonna be okay. When we find your Daddy, we just need to make sure that this time we really were nowhere near Wisconsin…."

**The End**


End file.
